by Ryder Stacy
“What the hell is he doing?” Rock screamed out as the papyrus platform filled with a foot of water. Rock, Chen, and Rahallah were in a wading pool.
“I think it’s the elephant’s method of cooling off.” Rahallah laughed. “Otherwise he’d just blow out his whole system from the heat generated by all this running. He knows what he’s doing better than we do.” And Rahallah’s observation was correct, for after not more than three minutes, the elephant emerged from the water dripping wet. It seemed to be ready to carry out further commands as it stood there dripping, almost motionless, letting the slight wind sweep over its huge body as the water evaporated, creating a cooling effect. An organic air conditioner.
Rockson heard the smash-stones again. Catching up. “Okay, let’s head downriver and lose them—and find our own army!” Chen said, patting the beast on the back of its head. It raised its great skull up and down as if nodding yes. Rockson couldn’t help but continue to hope they would find some refuge at the end of this wild ride. A lifelong elephant-rider no doubt wouldn’t have batted an eyelash at the bouncing up and down. But with the Freefighters, who weren’t quite used to the ride, their legs and butts were sore, as if they’d been bouncing on porcupine quills. Everything below the waist felt as if it were on fire to Rockson.
It took another half hour or so for them to reach the rear defensive units of Tutankhamen’s slowly moving army. They related the bad news to the army’s outpost men, who were sitting atop four heavily armored elephants, and were told the general was three miles ahead at the lead of the army.
They shot off alongside the outpost men’s beasts, and soon found the main body of the army.
The elephants were heavy-laden, their packs loaded down with all the various forms of smaller lasers that the fighters possessed, and mucho supplies. Women and children rode in the center, the most protected part of the migration.
“Rockson, Rahallah—you are safe,” Tutankhamen said when he saw them ride up. Tutankhamen rode in the very forefront of the army with his top ten generals on elephants around him, so they could confer and make plans while in motion.
“Yes, but Sesostris is dead,” Rockson yelled back as Chen brought their war bull to an even pace alongside the general. “And—and—” he could hardly bring himself to say it. “And Killov has all the goddamn sticks now—the Qu’ul and the Ra.”
Tutankhamen’s face went pale. “Then we are doomed,” the Great Pharaoh said, his words slow and terribly sad. “All our people—you as well. Probably the whole planet within another year or two. Everything will be gone. We have failed. Failed ourselves—and failed the living gods.”
“Not so fast, chief,” Rockson said, jumping up so he was balancing on the middle of the war platform. “Let’s see if we can’t have a little powwow and figure this whole stinking thing out.” He stepped over until he was on the edge of his elephant, and suddenly leaped out, jumping across a good six feet to the side of Tutankhamen’s bull.
Two of his guards, armed with long razor-edged swords, looked a little nervous as there had been assassination attempts over the years. But Rockson smiled and raised his hands to show he had nothing bad in mind. He sat down quickly in the extra-wide battle station that was the pharaoh’s. This one was a good eight feet on a side, extending out over the sides of the elephant. Inside it was a priceless carpet and silk pillows to lie on. Now this was more like it, Rockson decided on the spot.
“Have you a map?” Rock asked.
“Yes! I was just going over this map,” Tutankhamen said, pointing to a spread-out sheet of papyrus in the middle of his finely woven rug. The paper had its own glow, as the tomb did. “You see, we’re here.” He swept his finger along the Nile, indicating their position near it.
Rock pointed too. “They’re back about here,” he said, pointing to a spot a good foot behind them on the map. “I would estimate about twenty miles off, moving at approximately twelve miles an hour, hopefully not this way. They might not be aware of us—maybe!”
Rockson looked at the map, getting a sense of where they were, the scale of things. If only he had done this before!
The pharaoh said, “We can travel maybe another hundred miles and then—it will become much slower for the bulls as they are heavy burdened, plus there are thick, pointed rocks everywhere along the riverbanks. Ordinarily the bulls can handle rocks and stones, but these are known as the spear stones—because of their extremely sharp tips. It gets worse the farther you get in. I want to get there and maybe have a few days to figure out some strategy. It is a defendable area.”
“What’s this here?” Rockson asked, pointing to a large shape jutting right across the river.
“The Aswan Dam,” Tutankhamen replied. “An immense dam made of concrete thicker than the Great Pyramid. It was built before the Great Nuke War.”
“Does it still work—I mean, hold water, whatever, behind it?”
“Yes—much water. A vast Nile-fed lake,” Tutankhamen replied. “Often my people have fished from the reservoir of water above it. We call it Umm Durmankh. I have floated on its placid surface, in better days. Yes—it is filled with water, billions upon countless billions of gallons.”
“Then I’m getting a crazy idea,” Rock said as he stroked his forehead nervously, almost afraid to propose the thought.
“Well, let me hear it,” Tutankhamen said, leaning back on the side of the platform against several pillows. “My generals and I haven’t been coming up with any thing—any thing that would really stop them. After the reports of their ability to kill such huge numbers of men and even war bulls so easily—I can’t pretend that we can use our usual tactics. They would be useless.”
“That’s exactly it, Your Greatness,” Rockson said as their bull suddenly jumped up right over a fallen cypress tree. Rock felt his stomach turn over a few times as they soared a good twelve feet through the air, though Tutankhamen didn’t seem to notice. But then he’d been born and bred on these damned things. “We can’t face them directly,” Rock continued. “As powerful as your lasers are, they’re just no match for falling mountains. But what if—what if somehow we could lure them into this lower valley below the Aswan Dam. And then—using the war bulls’ combined laser power—crack open the dam and send all that water down on the Killovian forces. Like Old Moses and the Red Sea. We’ll smack it down on them like a tidal wave. They have rocks, we have water!”
“It’s—I—” the pharaoh seemed genuinely nonplussed by the idea—not even sure whether it was insane or the best concept of the last hundred years. It was an awesome idea, and his brain tried to expand to envelop it.
“Yes, I suppose the combined power of all our lasers might break the shell of concrete that holds back the water. It’s all theoretically possible I would imagine. But—”
“Yeah, I know. But. I feel the same way,” Rock said. “But we know for sure what’s going to happen if we don’t get something spectacular to match their firepower. It’s like, as far as I can see, we’ve got nothing to lose.”
“Oh, great Isis,” Tutankhamen said, raising his arms high to the streaked dawn. “Send me a sign. Tell us of your wishes.” As Rockson looked on—and, from their elephant, Chen and Rahallah as well—a single meteor streaked suddenly across the sky, much brighter than the fading pinpoints of the stars. It rode for a full four seconds, streaking blue and white and then red. Then it was gone.
“Red, white, blue!” the general shouted. “Like your flag! The gods have spoken,” Tutankhamen yelled excitedly, turning around as he addressed the generals via a handspeaker. They listened with growing amazement.
“To Aswan. To Aswan, our entire army—where the final battle of Egypt will be fought. One way or another,” the leader shouted, “whether we live or die—whether we win or not, we are fighting the holy war. The war of Isis and Ra.” Tutankhamen raised his battle sword high, and the first real rays of the sun bounced off it. The generals around his battle elephant raised their two-pronged spears and cheered, stabbin
g them in the air. The war bulls began moving forward at increased speed, so that within minutes they were traveling at full gallop heading straight for the Aswan. And as they rode the riders on them sang. To Rockson it sounded like:
We ride to death. To death we ride.
We shall live and our enemy die.
Or we shall die and our enemy live.
But we fight the battle of Isis and Ra.
And we ride to death, we ride to death.
Twenty-Six
It was a tremendous strategic question: how best to blow the damned thing up. And how to lure Killov and his forces right into the path of the great wave that would come down the lower Aswan Valley from the burst Aswan dam. If it did burst. And how to survive it all themselves.
Rock and Tutankhamen, Chen, Rahallah, and all ten of the pharaoh’s generals all shouted ideas and battle plans back and forth. Until at last, as they came to within about ten miles of the dam, they all agreed.
They saw it now, as they came around a curve in the river, rising like some manmade mountain ahead, curving all the way across the mile-wide river, storing up its immense liquid power on the other side of titanic concrete walls.
Rock and his men and about a third of the elephants headed across to the other side of the river via the wide road on the top of the dam. Tutankhamen led the other two thirds of the army along the side they were on. Another hundred of the fastest war bulls, ridden by volunteer relatives of Sesostris, were the bait to pull the Army of Amun straight into the lower Aswan Valley, where they would be in the path of the bursting tidal wave. Or so it went on paper.
Rockson was glad to be back on Kral. The beast had made its way back across the desert, following some super-homing instinct!
Once across the Nile, Rock could see Tutankhamen’s bulls setting up into long triple lines along a concrete roadway that ran right up the side of the steep hill on the west side of the Aswan Dam. That road had been built up heavily to take even big service vehicles. There were walkways and multi-layered levels everywhere. Tutankhamen stood on his elephant, screaming out directions to his troops through his handspeaker. The man had a booming voice, and it carried down over the whole valley, echoing back and forth across the face of the dam so even Rock could hear it on the wind from over a mile away.
Rock pulled out the old binocs that the elephant generals had dug up for him. They were rusted, with U.S. Army markings on them, so Rock knew they were at least a century old. But then the United States had been supplying the Egyptian Army with weapons and military supplies for years before the conflagration. And now they had come full circle back to him, an American. He focused the glasses downriver as his elephant trudged ahead, one step after another as the rocky slope got steeper.
Rockson could see the whole thing, as if it was some kind of miniature battle scene made out of clay, far below him. The valley opening out as the mountains on each side slowly slanted downward as they drew away from the dam. The Nile extended far to the north. A band of green ran along each side. And there, about three miles off, the bait to lure Killov—the elephant force, racing with everything it had back up the valley along the side of the river.
As Rockson raised the glasses a little more, he heard a sudden, terrible roar as a piece of rock the size of a subway car came slamming down on three or four of the spread-out bait-squad. Too soon!
When it rose up, there was just red and splintered bone where the beasts and men had been. All along the field of his glasses the enemy was coming down the valley from both sides—on camel, on foot, even a contingent on some sort of levitated raft! But it was the ones in the very forefront, the first ranks of the moving camels, the riders holding the red anti-grav sticks, that Rock was interested in.
He focused the glasses for a second, and thought he spotted Killov as a peaked hood fell from a gaunt, pale face. He swore he saw the Skull staring back up at him and pointing a Qu’ul!
At that very instant a huge boulder came down just yards from some of the other bait-riders, this group more fortunately situated.
The Amun priests tried again. They quickly sent more boulders slamming down onto the lure-force. Others saw that there was something going on up on the slopes of each side of the dam. Huge rock slabs came flying through the sky, shooting up toward the ranks of war bulls on each side of the dam that were filling every bit of stone or cement walkway that could be found.
Rock waited as planned, though it was agonizingly hard to. They had to sucker the Killov forces into the valley, get them in trouble as much as possible. Get them close to the dam, so there would be no way out, no way they’d miss the brunt of the crashing sea of water.
But suddenly, waiting wasn’t possible any longer. Boulders began coming down on both sides of the river, slamming into the elephants on Rock’s flank and on the far side as well. It was as if thunder was going off in their very midst. Suddenly, ahead of time, Tutankhamen’s forces were shooting up at the dam. The elephants all raised their trunks and fired out the laser rays’ blue and red, snapping with electric energy.
Rockson gave his beast the kick signal for aiming and firing, and it raised its long trunk as well. The laser apparatus came whirring out of the snout, and began glowing and blinking a deep violet color. The elephants behind Kral followed suit, as the whole slope of war bulls with riders all over their backs raised their trunks and the laser weapons emerged.
The whole contingent of laser-equipped pachyderms shot, and a thousand beams of the most aching blue the world had ever seen came instantaneously out of them. Unlike bullets, the laser wave didn’t take time. It just was there. Between the Tutankhamen forces on both sides of the Nile, there were literally thousands of the crackling rays playing over the surface of the dam. It all didn’t seem to be doing a damn thing, though. They had to concentrate the beams more accurately, Rock suddenly realized, bring all the power to an exact focus.
“Fire exactly where I’m firing,” Rock screamed out over one of the Egyptian handspeakers. The word was passed down the line and within seconds, more and more of the blue beams were snapping into the same spot—just about dead center on the dam, the spot where Rockson figured the greatest weight of water would be pressing in from the other side. The spot in a dam that Rocky Mountain beavers always fortified!
Across the Nile, Tutankhamen saw what Rock had in mind, and commanded his forces to do the same. Killov’s forces were right down the river, just five hundred yards off, closing in on the sacrifice-force tearing along just in front of them.
The concrete in the dead center of the dam began to glow—first orange, then white. It takes a lot of heat to make concrete melt, but the combined strength of 3,000 beams of laser energy was like a controlled thermonuclear explosion.
Suddenly the circle of heat was a good twenty feet wide and almost blue like the laser beams themselves. There was a roar, even louder than the slamming rocks of the Amun Army rising and falling all around them now and creating mega-death through their ranks. All the men looked up as the spot that had been glowing erupted out of the face of the dam like a lava explosion, red hot and melting.
A burst of water came shooting out behind the spewing concrete pieces, under incredible pressure as it rushed through the circular twenty-foot hole. And even as the elephants were commanded to shut off their lasers, their riders gazed up to see the Nile’s immense water pressure eating at the edges of the rapidly expanding hole.
It was like a domino effect—but very fast. The circle of exploding concrete spread, moving out on all sides as the water bit away at the ninety-foot-thick cement dam at the rate of about five-hundred feet a second. And the more water that roared out in a waterfall dwarfing Niagara itself, the bigger the hole became. Suddenly the whole center of the Aswan went with a roar that took out over a billion tons of concrete in an instant, sending it flying through the air, straight down at the advancing Killovian forces and the heroic, doomed remnant of the bait-squad.
But the concrete shrapnel was the least of
their worries. For right behind it was a wall of water as high as an eighty-story building as half the liquid contents of the multi-trillion-gallon reservoir that the dam had contained came out in the space of seconds.
The wave roared out into the air like a thing alive, a twisting maelstrom of liquid which just seemed to expand out in every direction as it flew. Rock could see right away that it was going to take out some of the main force’s elephants too. Those who were on the lower rock ledges or concrete walkways across river below five hundred feet elevation might be in trouble.
Five hundred yards down the river, the army of Killov saw the great wall of blue water right overhead and realized they’d been trapped. But there wasn’t a hell of a lot they could do beyond point with their power-sticks around in the air. It’s hard to push back water. Liquids are tricky. And they only had about two seconds to learn how. For suddenly, the tidal wave which had flown out a good two thousand feet from the face of the high dam came down in one immense wall a half mile on a side. It crashed with the loudest sound Rock had ever heard, making his eardrums vibrate like rubber bands. Heroes and villains, everyone and everything in the flood’s path instantly disappeared beneath the crushing waters.
On both sides of the Nile, spreading back a mile, camels, riders, and thousands of infantry died as the water crashed down. And it was far bigger slaughter than any of the mountains the Skull-man had raised up to kill. They all just vanished beneath the churning foam and twisting blackness. Their anti-grav sticks were sucked down, and boulders everywhere dropped from the sky as they regained their full weight, bounding down the slopes into the churning madness.